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Multigraph Collective releases first book: Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation

Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter first joined the Multigraph Collective in 2013. That group's first book, Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (2018), offers an innovative approach to the study of print culture based on the concept of interactivity. The approach was itself conceived, developed, and articulated in a novel, interactive way. Twenty-two collaborators collectively wrote this book using both an online platform and old-fashioned annual symposia, and are jointly responsible for all it contains. In it, they investigate how people interacted with printed matter, how they used print media to interact with other people, and how printed texts and images interacted within complex media ecologies. ‘Interactive’ is a word most often associated with digital technologies; this book contends that a nuanced and historicized concept of interactivity is key to developing a deeper understanding of print, which emerged as the predominant communications technology in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.